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Holden
laughter in his helmet. Here he was, Johnny Love, the first Martian! and the last! Using the last of the strength
in his bruised body to go forward, when there was no forward and no backward, no direction at all; breathing
when there was no purpose in breathing.
Why not shut off the valves now?
He was too tired for hysteria. Men had died alone before. Alone, but never without hope! And here there was
no hope, for there was no life, and no man had ever lived where there was not life!
But he had come to see, and he was seeing, and in the remaining hours left to him he would see what no man
had seen in a half a million years.
Harrison and Janes or Lamson and Fowler would not be down for twenty days at the inside; that had been the
time-table. Twenty days, twenty years ... he heard himself laugh again. Time-table!
He and Ferris first. Then Harrison and Janes. Then Lamson and Fowler, all at twenty-day intervals. If all
landed safely, they would use Exploration Plan I, Condition Optimum. If only two crews made it down, Plan
II; Condition Limited. And if only one made the 273-day journey from the orbit of Terra--that would be Plan
III; Condition Untenable, Return. The twenty-day interval idea had come from some Earth-bound swivel-chair
genius who had probably never even set foot in a Satellite operations room. Somebody had impressed on him
when he was young that egg-carrying was a safer mission with a multiplicity of baskets; it was common sense
that if anything happened to Mars-I touching down, at least it wouldn't happen to II and III at the same time.
Common sense, Johnny thought, and he laughed again. Space was not common, and it was not sensible. And
nobody had ever taught it the rules men made.
He kept walking, seeing, thinking and breathing.
For a long time. He fell once or twice and picked himself up again to walk some more, and then he fell a final
time, and did not get up. Red sand whispered over him, danced lightly, drifted....
*****
The flat, wide-tracked vehicle swerved in a tight arc, throwing up low ruby-colored clouds on either side. Its
engines throbbed a new note of power, and it scuttled in a straight line across the desert floor like a fleck of
shiny metal drawn by an unseen magnet. Behind it rose a thinning monument of green-black smoke, and
between its tracks was a wavering line of indentations in the sand already half-obliterated by the weight of
their own shallow walls. But they became deeper as the vehicle raced ahead; and then at length they ended,
and the vehicle halted.
There was a mound of sand that the winds, in their caprice, would not have made alone, for they sculptured in
a freer symmetry. And the child-like figures seemed to realize that at once.
With quick precision they levelled the mound and found Johnny Love. They took him into their vehicle, and
deftly matched and replenished the waning gas mixture in the cylindrical tanks on his back.
Then they drove away with him.
*****
"Ferris?"
"I can hear," Johnny said. It was suddenly easier to talk. Even easier to understand. They had done
something....
"We are surprised that your state of shock was not more severe. In the process of analyzing you, we
discovered that you were totally unprepared for Space-flight, and therefore--"
"Unprepared? What do you think all those months of physical conditioning were for? Yeah, and all those
damned textbooks? You think that barrel I cracked up was built in a Kindergarten class--"
"Space-flight requires but a relative minimum of those things, Earthman. Required most is psychological and
philosophical conditioning."
"To what?"
"To all things unreal. Because they are the most real; infinity applies to probability and possibility far more
directly than to simple Space and Time. But--are you calm now?" The voice was growing deeper, and seemed
almost friendly. Johnny tried his muscles; they weren't paralyzed--he could move easily, and his head was
clear. And there was no anger, now. No "shock."
"Go ahead," he said.
"Our examination of you has indicated that your race is a potentially effective one, with a superior survival
factor. We feel that, properly instructed and assisted, such a race might be of great value as a friend and ally.
In short, we receive you in peace and friendship, Earthman. Will you accept us in like manner?"
Johnny tried to think. Hard thoughts, the way men were supposed to think. What kind of game was it? What
were the strings? The angles ... the gimmicks. What did they really want?
His lips were dry and barely moved over his teeth, but the words came easily. "Who says you're a friend?"
"We would have learned as much about you by examining your corpse, Earthman."
So he was alive, and that had to prove something. And it might have been a lot of trouble to keep him that
way. The hell of it was you couldn't know ... Anything ... you couldn't know anything when you were tossed
into the middle of the impossible. He felt the skin on the back of his neck chill and tighten.
But who held out their hand like this?
Whoever did anything like that?
No.
"We wish to help you, Earthman, and your race. We have observed your kind at close quarters, yet we have
never landed among you nor attempted communication because of fear for ourselves. But with proper help,
there need be no fear between us. We offer you friendship and progress."
"You keep talking about what we get out of it." Johnny stared upward at the ceiling, got his eyes off the little
shuttered aperture. He wished he had a cigarette. "You sound too damned much like a politician."
"Perhaps at this point you should be informed that your ship is completely repaired, and ready for your return
to Earth whenever you desire."
"So, it's--You said Harrison and Janis would be here in nine days! That means I've been out for nearly two
weeks! For a nap that's a long time, but nobody could get that bucket back in one piece in eleven days! Not
after what I did to it--"
"Your ship is completely repaired, Earthman."
Johnny knew somehow that the voice wasn't lying. So maybe when you got off of Earth miracles did happen.
He just didn't know enough.
"We wish to give you data to take back to your Earth which will banish disease for you--all disease. Data
which will give you spacecraft that match our own in technical perfection. Data that will make you the
undisputed masters of your environment. We offer you the stars, Earthman."
He shut a thousand racing thoughts out of his head. "Maybe I'll believe this fairy tale of yours on one
condition," Johnny said, "because I can't intelligently do otherwise."
"And that--condition?"
"Tell me why."
There was a pause, and it was as though something forever unknowable to men hung in the silence.
"Picture, if you can, Earthman," the answer came at last, "several small islands in the center of a great sea; all
without life, save two. The men on one have learned to build boats which can successfully sail the sea within
certain limits--they can visit the other islands, but are too frail and too limited in power to venture past the
horizon. It is infinitely frustrating to them. The only places to which they may go are dead places. Save for
one--only one, and it becomes magnified in importance--it becomes an entire raison d'etre in itself. For
without it, the men with the boats sail uselessly....
"We are old, Earthman. We have watched you--waited for you for a long time. And now you have grown up.
You have burst your tiny bubble of human experience. You have set out upon the sea yourselves...."
"You guys should give graduation talks. I didn't ask for a scaled-down philosophy. You tell me that you want
to give us every trick in your hat--for free, no questions asked. So I asked why. And the question isn't
changing any."
"The answer should be self-evident, Earthman. We are old. And we are lonely."
*****
There was a logic at work somewhere in his brain even during the dream. It told him that he was exhausted
from the day's tour with the child-like men of Mars, and that the dream was only the vagaries of a reeling,
tired mind of a badly jarred subconscious. It told him that the things he had seen had been too alien for his
relatively inflexible adult Earth mind to accept without painful reaction, and this was the reaction.
This, the dream. That was all it was; his logic said so.
Faith spread out before the undisciplined eye of his dreaming brain, and the near-conscious instant of logic
faded. The fertile plains that once had been yellow desert-land mounted golden fruits to a temperate sun, and
beyond the distant green of gently-rolling hills spread the resplendent city, and there were other cities as
gracefully civilized beyond the untroubled horizon.
And in the dream, these were all things men had done, as though sanity had invaded their minds overnight. It
was the Earth that men had intended, rather than that which they had built.
The sun dimmed. The air chilled, and the grains and fruits wilted, and the rolling hills were a darker hue than
green as the shadow lengthened, spread to the gleaming cities beyond and then as it touched them and ran
soundlessly the length and breadth of their wide malls, there were other changes....
Skeletons, reaching upward to a puffy, leaden sky.
The horizon split into jagged, broken moats of dark flame, and Earth was no longer what men had built, but
what they eternally feared they must one day create....
Then Johnny Love was suddenly awake bolt upright in his cot and his eyes were open wide. His muscles were
taut and cramped. And he was afraid although the men of Mars had offered friendship and told him that there
was nothing for him to fear.
Slowly, he lay down again. And gradually, the cold perspiration that had encased him vanished; his body
relaxed, and the fear subsided.
The day's tour had been exhausting both mentally and physically, and there was the excitement of knowing
that in five more days Harrison and Janes would land. If they did not, his own ship would carry him safely
back to Earth on the day following, for the little men had miraculously repaired it; they had shown him. They
had shown him, and he wanted to go home.
Johnny Love rolled over on the wide, soft cot, sighed, and went back to sleep.
*****
"He sleeps again, Andruul."
"Yes, but the damage is probably done."
"No, or he would not sleep again so easily. His kind do not have such emotional control."
The two turned away from the fading transparency of the sleeping-room wall, and their short, thin bodies
were in incongruous contrast to the spaciousness of the metal-sheathed corridor down which they walked.
"Psychoanalysis showed up the difference in his brain structure--that apparently accounts for the poor
efficiency our screens are showing. What does Kaarn say?"
"He says we should never have allowed the theft."
Andruul cursed. "Allowed it! Those nomadic scum are like flies! No matter how many you exterminate, they
never fail to come back in double their number. And they strike at the precise moment you are certain the
bones of the last one are sinking beneath the sand. Somehow Central Patrol has got to get that unit back."
"You're certain it was a theft, then?"
"Don't be an idiot. Since when can those gypsies build anything more complex than a crude electrical
generator? Let alone a psibeam unit? They've forgotten what little their civilization ever knew."
"They are clever enough at evading directed over-surface missiles."
10
11
It was getting hot. His hull must be glowing, now, even in the thin atmosphere of Mars--it was a long fall.
Slower than a fall on Earth, through thinner air layers, yet he was glowing like a torch.
The ocean of sand rushed up.
And suddenly his left hand rammed the full-power stud.
It was as though he'd been hit from behind with all the brute force of some gigantic fist, and there were two
things. There was the split-second glimpse of a crescent formation suddenly wheeling toward him and there
was the clang of the scanner-alarm. There were those two things his brain registered before the titanic force of
full power squeezed consciousness from it and left him helpless.
*****
He was running. In a nightmare of a dead planet that was not dead, he ran, away from something.
That was how his consciousness returned. While he ran. He stopped, stumbling, turned to look behind him.
And the ship was there. Landed perfectly, stubby bullet-nose pointing to the sky. And above it-Run!
The command hit his brain with almost physical force. A will that was not his own took hold of his whole
being, and he was running again, plowing his way through the sucking sand with strength summoned from a
well of energy within his body that had never been there before.
Through the thin glassite walls of his helmet he could hear the thuk, thuk, thuk of his boots as they pounded
somewhere below him, and there was another pounding, a deadly rhythmic bursting pressure in his chest. And
a whine in his ears....
The wind-strewn sand stretched flat and infinitely before him. Then leaped at him headlong and there was no
horizon; there was only the sudden awful wrench of concussion, a tremor of pure sound which would, in
denser atmosphere, have destroyed him with the inertia of his own body.
He could not move. Only cling to the shifting desert floor that rocked sickeningly beneath his outstretched
body ... cling to it for dear life.
There was no thought, no understanding. Only a sensation which he could not comprehend, and the sure
knowledge that none of this was real. Not real, but the end of survival nonetheless.
*****
Pain, and seeing two bright objects transiting the darkness at which he looked; seeing something then
between.
His brain began identifying. The darkness; sky. The bright objects; Diemos, Phobos.... And the something
between-It was a transparency of some sort; curved, or he would not have been able to detect it at all. A vaulted ceiling
through which he could see....
His full consciousness came flooding back, then. He tried the muscles in his neck, they hurt, but they worked,
12
and he could move his head from side to side. There was the same transparency, as though he were covered by
some huge, invisible bowl.
And there were men. Big, muscular creatures, yet thin, tall.... Not like the others at all....
He sat bolt upright, and they did not move. It was not the same as before. No small room. No voice that he
could not see. They had not even removed his suit or his helmet, and he was lying on a hard, cold substance.
Then he saw what they were doing. There were two of them apart from the others, working to bring a
compact-looking machine into position near him. A gleaming, short cylinder, swung on gymbals between
slender forks, mounted on a thin wheeled standard. They were aiming it at him.
"No! No--" He tried to get to his knees, but it was as though there were no muscles in his body.
"Man of--Earth! We are friendly. Is that understood?"
The thought-words formed in his brain as the strange images had before, and then he knew. Should have
guessed it, part of his mind was telling him in a fantastically detached way, the dreams ... the compulsions
over which he had had no control in the ship.... This--thing. It probably-"You are quite astute, Earthman. But it is not our technology which created this device. To save you and the
civilization which you represent--and ultimately, our own--it was necessary for us to steal it. It cost six lives."
"Steal...."
"From your former captors. It is their invention, as are so many things with which they destroy. With this
instrument, they have succeeded in taking one of Nature's more subtle phenomenon--psychokinesis--and
amplifying its energies nearly a million-fold. Those stepped-up energies can then be projected in a tight or
fanned beam at will.
"They can make a man 'dream,' as you did--or they can destroy him outright, depending on which of the 'psi'
factors, ESP or PK, is given dominance during projection. But we are not skilled in its operation--they
detected our use of it on you while you slept, and from that moment on you were so well screened that even at
the risk of burning this unit out, we were not able to project powerfully enough to do more than merely touch
your brain--"
*****
There was a strange calm in his mind, now. He understood the words and accepted them as matter-of-factly as
they were given. Even now they were manipulating him like some intangible puppet, yet he was convinced it
was not a malevolent manipulation. Convinced. The conviction--manipulation, too....
"Only partly, Earthman. We said we are friendly, and we are. We have calmed you and erased your fear. From
this point on, we will use this instrument only for communication."
And then he felt the fear in him again, gnawing, and his body was again damp and cold. But he had control,
now. Control enough to speak.
They stood before him, immobile, watching.
Somewhere, Johnny Love found his voice.
13
"Look, I've been through this 'friendly' act before...." He hesitated, and they did not try to interrupt him. "Well
don't just stand there!" The fear was suddenly turning to the bitter anger of frustration, they had him whipped,
and he was tired. "Tell me why! You stick that thing into my head when I'm blasting for home. You force me
to drop back. You blow up my ship. Real friendly! Real sports!" For a moment he had run out of words, and
again they made no effort to answer him. "All right! I don't understand you--I don't know what you want. But
nobody is trying to hurt you, nobody's after your little desert paradise. We had an idea, that's all. We thought
we could make it work. People have been talking 'go to Mars' on my planet for longer than most of 'em can
remember. So we finally gave it a whirl! Sorry!"
He looked at them hard, then, and thought that there was something almost like a smile on the face of one.
Smile, then, damn you....
"We want nothing, Earthman, but to prevent from happening on your planet the thing that happened on this. If
they succeed in destroying you as they have us, then this System will always be under their heel, and we shall
never be rid of them. Understand, their numbers were too few ever to conquer a planet with a civilization as
large and as highly organized as that of Earth, by physical means.
"Knowing that, we--they call us gypsies, nomads, desert-scum today--we were not too alarmed when they
landed here two centuries ago. We were glad to take from them, without paying a price. We were awed by
their gifts. Their papers and their books, which would show us how to rebuild our waning
civilization--advance us a thousand years in less than fifty; restore to us our lost arts.... And compared to you,
we were so very few.
"In return, they said that all they wanted was permission to set up a research site. They told us they were a
scientific expedition from far out-System. Aldeberan, they said. Part of a vast exploratory program which they
had been conducting for centuries.
"We believed them--why not? One day, we thought, we too will be in Space. And with that day would begin
one of the greatest projects of exploration that our race had ever known. So we agreed, and gladly."
"Hold it, hold it! 'They'--who the hell are 'they'? You can spare the suspense...."
And then there was no more words. The pictures formed in his mind as before, only stronger, now, and there
were no details left out.
The weapons of war had been built, not by the out-System men, but by their hosts. The plans had not proven
too difficult to follow....
The new knowledge was not hoarded, was not held under jealous guard by those who had given it, but by
those to whom it had been given. One man from another; one group of men from another. States and nations
from each other.
Until there was no trust left on all the planet.
There were the wars, then.
And when they were over, the new masters had established their first beachhead in the new System.
"But, it was only a beachhead, and had been only intended as such--" The pictures broke off; the unspoken
words resumed. "Your planet was the ultimate target, but at first, your civilization was not adequately
advanced to fall prey to their technique. Their weapon is knowledge, but the potentialities of that knowledge
must be understood by a people before it can be effectively used to destroy them.
14
"The rest must be self-evident. After we destroyed ourselves, they sank their infectious, hollow roots into our
planet. And from then, investigated your Earth from time to time ... and waited....
"Waited, because they knew you would be coming. And they knew what kind of men you would be. Strong
men, with the light of the stars in your eyes. Yet confused, weak men, with the darkness of suspicion and
jealousy still in your souls. Such are humans, after all....
"That is why we stopped you, Johnny Love. Once your blast-off ogee had carried you beyond the curvature of
their horizon and brought you over us, our psibeam was effective and theirs were not. We are sorry about your
ship. Once they realize that you were under our influence, and were returning rather than taking their precious
data to your people, they zeroed-in with those damnable guided juggernauts--"
"It wasn't you, then. You mean they--"
"There is little that they cannot do. Destruction is their forte. They could not keep us from preventing your
taking their 'gift' to your people, but they could keep that 'gift' from falling into our hands--and they did. They
do not always win. But they never lose."
"But I--" Johnny's thoughts raced. The ship, gone. And Harrison and Janes, Lamson, and Fowler. They would
be landing in a few days. They-"Yes," the thoughts of the true Martians before him answered. "And they will be given a 'gift' for Terra as you
were. If your friends return successfully to your planet with that 'gift'--then--"
The thought was not completed. But it did not have to be.
A beachhead was one thing. These scattered, struggling people who had once been masters of Mars might one
day unseat it, for they were not yet beaten people, and their will to survive was yet strong. But beyond that-Earth taken, the System taken.
There it was.
There was a sudden coldness inside him now that the fact had crystallized, had become real. Here was no
fantasy; no wild surmise.
They left him in silence while he thought, their psibeam turned away, now.
Harrison and Janes. Lamson, and Fowler. Had to stop them. Stop them, and then somehow, get home. He
ached for home.
He thought about Ferris, who had given his life for this thing.
No, Ferris would not be going home. Ferris was dead.
He signalled for the psibeam to be turned toward him again.
"You'd have to know their positions out there to make contact, wouldn't you?" They did not answer. He
worked to get the words formed, and there was a fleeting thought of a green, lush planet far away, its wide
streets and rolling fields bathed in warm sunlight. "I can figure 'em," he said. "I know blast-off schedules,
speeds. I know the works! Those things they had in the books. Then you guys can do the rest with--that thing.
Right?"
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